ITICSE

We are pleased to present the proceedings of the annual ITiCSE Conference, the eighth in a series of international conferences that began in 1996 in Barcelona. During these years, ITiCSE conferences have created a long tradition in advancing research in the field of Computer Science Education and strengthening collaboration among researchers from all over the world. The quantitative and qualitative characteristics of ITiCSE 2003 give us a strong indication that this conference will continue that fine tradition.This year ITiCSE is hosted in Thessaloniki, a city of great and long history. In addition to the high quality technical program, the conference will also provide you with social events that will exhibit the life and the history of Thessaloniki and the region of Macedonia. With the planned Sunday and Monday receptions, the Tuesday banquet, the farewell party, and the excursions we hope that you will have the opportunity to make "new friends" and get a taste of Greek cuisine and hospitality.The conference program contains three invited speakers, three tutorials, exhibits, posters, demonstrations, forty-four papers in two parallel tracks, three panels, and a session of Tips & Techniques.We are extremely honored to have as invited speakers three prominent computer scientists whose contribution to education has been enormous. Maria Klawe, the President of ACM, is giving the opening keynote address. Christos H. Papadimitriou, recipient of the Knuth Prize in 2002, is giving the second day keynote address. Donald E. Knuth, winner of the ACM Alan Turing Award in 1974 and the IEEE Jon von Neumann award in 1995, is giving the closing keynote address.ITiCSE conferences are characterized as multinational, and this year's participants are coming from 16 different countries. However, many countries with an exceptional research activity won't be present. We hope that future ITiCSE conferences will attract even more papers from various countries, because we believe that the coexistence of colleagues from different countries with different scientific and cultural backgrounds can produce new collaborations and research projects.This year, 129 full papers were submitted and 44 of them were finally selected for the conference. The decision process was very hard since we had to leave out some exceptional papers. The number of posters this year increased, and 55 will be presented in this conference. Faithful to the ITiCSE tradition, we offer Working Groups as well as other forms of communication such as Demos, Tutorials and Tips and Techniques, which play an important role to the dissemination of ideas and thoughts and also help bring researchers and scientists together in a more informal manner.We hope that the ITiCSE 2003 will become part of the ITiCSE tradition.Dear colleagues and collaborators, welcome to ITiCSE 2003!